Breakup painful but inspiring for Robison

Friday

NASHVILLE -- Country rocker Charlie Robison didn't have to retreat to a cabin in the hills or listen to old records to find inspiration for his new album, "Beautiful Day."

He found it in his collapsing marriage to Dixie Chick Emily Robison.

"We decided we were getting a divorce on the day I was in the studio cutting," Robison said. "It wasn't a look back on divorce or looking forward at what it could be. It was actually what was going on at the time."

The couple split in 2008 after nine years together. Court papers say their marriage had become "insupportable because of discord and or conflict of personalities." They have three children.

Robison, a 44-year-old Texas-based singer-songwriter, says the demands of their careers became too much. His former wife, a multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter for the Dixie Chicks, has sold tens of millions of records as part of the Grammy-winning trio.

They won five Grammys, including album of the year, in 2007 for their last album, "Taking the Long Way Home."

"It's not the fault of either one of us," said Robison. "We were just following our careers. That's pretty much why a lot of entertainment relationships don't work."

The uproar over the Dixie Chicks' negative remarks about former President George W. Bush in London in 2003 didn't help.

"That was an extremely stressful time," Robison recalled. "She was pregnant with our twins. I had put a record out and was gone all the time and she was gone all the time. So it definitely was a time when a couple needed to be there for each other, the most important time, and neither one of us was there."

Emily Robison declined comment for this story. But Charlie says that since the split they've become friends again and have dinner with their kids a few times a week and take family vacations together.

He let her hear the songs as he finished them because he didn't want there to be any surprises.

"It helped that she is a songwriter as well," he said. "She was very understanding. If she had been writing a record at the time, I'm sure she'd be writing about the same type of thing."

On his CD released in June, Robison portrays a man who's hit bottom and begun to see better days: "Hope this never ends, raise my face into the sun, hope this never ends, guess you never were the one," he sings on "Feelin' Good."

While making the record, he lived across from the Greyhound bus station in San Antonio, in a loft apartment with mismatched furniture and strewn beer bottles, "the quintessential bachelor pad," he recalls.

"I was writing things the night before I'd go into the studio to cut them. It was a real stream-of-consciousness thing. I didn't have to think about how I was going to put things, I was basically dictating what was going on that day," said Robison, who wrote six of the 10 tracks and self-produced the disc.

Robison has released seven albums of rootsy country rock since 1996, mostly on independent record labels.

"Charlie has his own persona, his own vibe," said his younger brother, Bruce Robison, also a singer-songwriter in Austin, whose tunes have been recorded by George Strait, Tim McGraw and the Dixie Chicks.

"I think people can really relate to it. They know who he is and what he's about. They want to be his pal."

Country singer Jack Ingram, a longtime friend of Robison's, said Robison's new record is the "most personal thing I've ever heard him write or record."

"Most of those songs seem to be pretty heart on the sleeve," Ingram said.

Robison didn't set out to make a record for people going through breakups. He thinks the songs are more about redemption and finding a new chapter in life than about sorrow. But fans are finding their own interpretations.

"People come up to me and say they're going through something right now and it's like this is completely written about them," Robison said. "I wasn't meaning to do that, but it's been a residual effect of the record."

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